Create nifty looking 3d metal balls in Photoshop without any additional plugins.

This tutorial has been developed using Adobe Photoshop 7.0 however you can transfer the 3D transform plug-in onto Photoshop CS & CS2.

1: Make a new document, none of these options really matter much so long as it’s a square of sorts.. and its RGB Color, your choice.

2: There are two ways of doing this. 1st way produces the balls in a river of liquid metal, second one creates them by themselves. (For the second way, refer to the bottom of this tutorial under the extra options.) Change your foreground colour to a light grey and your background colour to a darker grey, quite dark.

3: Now select the gradient tool and drag a perfect (hold shift) diagonal line across the page from top left to bottom right.

4: After doing this it’s mostly always going to be different shaped from here. Go to Filter > Render > 3D Transform and select the sphere tool (N). Now drag out a decent amount of small circles apart from each other. You don’t want them overlapping, add some occasional larger ones. This will be the “Chrome Balls” in the river of metal. Now select the Trackball tool